Dallas police raid two church offices and a storage facility

Police on Wednesday raided the Catholic Diocese of Dallas headquarters in Oak Lawn, St. Cecilia Catholic Church in Oak Cliff and a Safesite Inc. storage facility in Mountain Creek.

The locations were thought to house "implements or instruments used in the commission of a crime, or items constituting evidence of a criminal offense or constituting evidence tending to show a particular person committed a criminal offense," according to a search warrant affidavit filed by Detective David Clark.

Five priests are named in the search warrant affidavit

The diocese has said Paredes, the longtime pastor at St. Cecilia, was credibly accused of molesting three teenage boys in the parish more than a decade ago.

The other suspects identified in the affidavit were also on the diocese’s list of credibly accused priests.

Brown was named by a woman who said he sexually assaulted her niece at Holy Family of Nazareth in Irving in the 1980s, according to the affidavit, along with other victims in Washington, D.C., Illinois and other places.

The affidavit also details accusations that Hughes had sexual intercourse with a minor over a six-month period in 1983 and that Buitrago molested a 5- to 7-year-old girl whose family attended St. Mark the Evangelist Catholic Church in Plano.

Myers was accused of molesting a teenager before and after the student was expelled from Subiaco Academy in Arkansas, according to the investigation.

The sexual abuse allegedly continued after the student moved to Dallas.

Of those priests, only Paredes has been charged with a crime. Paredes is believed to have fled to his native Philippines.

Dallas Bishop Edward J. Burns said at a news conference Wednesday that the diocese has been cooperating with the investigation and has given police the personnel files "for all the priests named in the warrant.”

Diocese officials are accused of providing police with sketchy records

The diocese turned over a 541-page file on Brown, but it didn't include information about accusations made in 2004 by a victim who said Brown abused her in Irving in the ’80s, the affidavit says.

Police told the diocese that details about the allegations of misconduct were missing. Three weeks later, attorneys provided 51 more pages that had been left out. Even so, little of that included information about the 2004 allegation, the affidavit states.

In addition, a 319-page file on Hughes did not include anything about the accusations of sexual abuse in 1983 and didn't name the victim or outline the punishment, "if any," against him. The affidavit also says that another priest destroyed “love letters” between Hughes and the victim.

When police sought all the files regarding complaints against "priests, clergy, bishops, nuns, teachers, deacons or any current or former staff of the Dallas Catholic Diocese," they were told in an email that many of the complaints would be "irrelevant to the Dallas Police Department” and that the diocese already had provided police with “all of the claimant files related to living, current and former priests.”

Police frustrated with diocese officials' lack of helpfulness

Clark's affidavit also accuses the diocese of bias, saying its six-member task force of former law enforcement officers "does not have the needed expertise to render judgment on the credibility of child abuse allegations."

Clark says in the affidavit that the police department identified only one member of the investigative team and that he was “not aware of any experience ... this individual possesses related to child abuse investigations."

He also suggests that the then-chancellor of the diocese, Mary Edlund, notified law enforcement in February 2018 of allegations of sexual abuse against Paredes only "as a predicate to the anticipated negative publicity associated” with them.

Other investigations reported similar problems getting information

Detective Clark said that law enforcement personnel elsewhere told him similar stories about incomplete records.

An FBI agent in New Mexico said that his office searched the Archdiocese of Santa Fe for information about two victims and that it was clear "someone made an attempt to hide this box of information to hinder his investigation," Clark's affidavit says.

A Conroe police detective also told Clark that a subpoena regarding information about a priest in Montgomery County was incomplete and that the Diocese of Galveston-Houston did not turn over everything regarding the priest.